Along with the Perl interpreter itself,
the Perl distribution installs a range of utilities on your system.
There are also several utilities which are used by the Perl distribution itself as part of the install process.
This document exists to list all of these utilities,
explain what they are for and provide pointers to each module's documentation,
if appropriate.

The main interface to Perl's documentation is perldoc,
although if you're reading this,
it's more than likely that you've already found it.
perldoc will extract and format the documentation from any file in the current directory,
any Perl module installed on the system,
or any of the standard documentation pages,
such as this one.
Use perldoc <name> to get information on any of the utilities described in this document.

If it's run from a terminal,
perldoc will usually call pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see perlpod for an explanation) into a manpage,
and then run man to display it; if man isn't available,
pod2text will be used instead and the output piped through your favourite pager.

If you just want to know how to use the utilities described here,
pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE" section; some of the utilities will automatically call pod2usage on themselves when you call them with -help.

pod2usage is a special case of podselect,
a utility to extract named sections from documents written in POD.
For instance,
while utilities have "USAGE" sections,
Perl modules usually have "SYNOPSIS" sections: podselect -s "SYNOPSIS" ... will extract this section for a given file.

The roffitall utility is not installed on your system but lives in the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the documentation from the distribution to *roff format,
and produces a typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.

The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test the Perl version it was built under. It can be used after running make install (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.

perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the perl interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug thoroughly before using it to submit a bug report.

Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries, programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C header files. You may still see require 'syscall.ph' or similar around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to convert a whole bunch of header files at once.

c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program but behave differently depending on how they are called, provide another way of getting at C with Perl - they'll convert C structures and union declarations to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs these days.

enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc). Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl. No knowledge of XS is necessary.

piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding converter widely available for various Unixen today. This script was primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.

ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility requires the Text::Diff module to function properly; this module isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)

cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm. It allows you to install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information about them, and a lot more. It is similar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,